Matters of love always reflect human beings as flawed and complicated. The range of emotions lived through is often contradictory, confusing, but ultimately enlightening. There is a difference between the individual’s emotions and the way they choose to express them. The love album and the break-up album depend on this capacity of expression. As a listener, I can relate to the parts of myself I see and feel in the music. In the absence of that, I have only the artist’s feeling, and no connection towards it. It is possible to obtain something of value from that which I find no connection with simply because the depth of the picture is such that I have a better understanding of the human experience, even if that experience is as far away from ours as possible.

The ultimate cause of the album’s failure is its shallowness. Considering how complicated Kanye can be in his public persona, it’s likely that this is a failure of clarity and expression rather than him being the uninteresting cartoon presented here.

The biggest factor is the misguided impression that direct confessional lyrics are the key to emotional resonance. Clarity and directness resonate more than poetry and obfuscation, right? No. There is nothing inherently wrong with using midnight phone call anecdotes or calling someone a spoiled L.A. girl when incorporated into some sort of emotional narrative. Kanye simply presents these statements and doesn’t seem to have either the ability or the disposition to develop them. Blood On The Tracks, a more successful work, conveys the musician’s personal feelings (born from Dylan’s crumbling relationship) through emotionally charged story-songs that are not biographical. The songs are a connecting point between the artist’s and the audience’s feelings. 808s lacks this connecting point; it simply recites an emotional biography. What little ideas he has are abused mercilessly. “Love Lockdown” has exactly one concept that it repeats for over four minutes. “Street Lights” is one simplistic metaphor for three. Weather descriptions and other simplistic cliches are used often. Ill-fitting pop culture references plague a few songs. There is something to be said about these type of cliches and their integration into the real life they purport to describe, but the only effect they have here is putting the authenticity of the emotions in question.

If the lyrics don’t form this personal connection, what do they do? They show a portrait of Kanye West chockful of character flaws. Alternating between being incessantly whiny, vindictive, and arrogant, he seems almost incapable of communicating even reasonable gestures in anything but the most offputting and antagonistic way. No one doubts the trappings of wealth and celebrity, but sympathy is not elicited by simultaneously bragging about one’s properties. The majority of lyrics consist of berating and scolding his ex. Perpetually stuck on the anger stage of grief, the album is disappointingly incapable of conveying the true love and joy that precedes the heartbreak, focusing more on finger-pointing and berating. With no way of understanding the love that resulted in such heartbreak, the anger is even more unrelatable.

Musically things don’t fare much better. Kanye’s restrictions upon himself make the production, even at its high points, inferior in variety and emotional versatility to previous albums. Almost every song suffers from some miserable quirk that threatens to sink it. “Robocop”, as if its lyrics weren’t terrible enough, throws itself off a cliff by having some ridiculous whirring sound during the chorus. “Love Lockdown” and “Street Lights” overstay their welcome in run time too, not just lyrically. “Say You Will” repeats its beat sans verse for a stupidly long amount of time on closure. “Paranoid”‘s synths are absurdly out of place and make the song seem like a lost 80s cut. The use of autotune is also a problem. Regardless of one’s hatred or enjoyment of it, its contant use is eventually tiring due to repetition. The distortion deprives the songs of much-needed emotional connection, a technique more suited to thomyorkian musings on alienation than ailments of the heart. The same applies to the presence of guests: quality of verse nonwithstanding, their presence removes intimacy from the contents of the songs. The rushed recording of the album probably contributed to all of these poor decisions.

This was a poorly thought out album in general. Kanye is not even remotely ready to get over his relationship, or at least to produce something of value about it. When he moves to “acceptance”, he might.